The key question concerning the mechanism is whether a betaine intermediate is accessed along the reaction (path A) or whether the reaction proceeds in a concerted manner (path B). Earlier computations had supported the concerted pathway (B).

Experimental determination of the heavy atom kinetic isotope effect was made for Reaction 1.

Reaction 1

Using the 6-31+G(2df,p) basis set, three different density functionals predict three different potential energy surfaces. With M06-2x, the surface indicates path A (stepwise), with the first step rate-limiting. B3P86 also predicts the stepwise reaction, but the second step is rate-limiting. The Lc-wPBE functional predicts a concerted reaction. Using these surfaces, they predicted the carbon isotope effect and compared it to the experimental values. The best agreement is with the M06-2x surface with a weighting of the vibrational energies of the two different TSs. The optimized structures of the two transition states, the betaine intermediate, and the product are shown in Figure 1.

The agreement of the predicted and experimental KIE is not ideal. So, they performed molecular dynamics computations with the ONIOM approach using M06-2x/6-31G* for Reaction 1 and 53 THF molecules treated at PM3. 360 trajectories were begun in the region of the first transition state (TS1), and they can be organized into 4 groups. The first group (128 trajectories) are reactions that produce product. The second group (76 cases) form the C-C bond but then it ruptures and returns to reactant. The third group (82 cases) have an immediate recrossing back to reactant, and the last group (16 cases) takes product back to the first TS and then returns to product. The predicted KIE using this weighted MD results gives values in outstanding agreement with the experiments.

Of the first group, about 50% pass from TS1 to TS2 in less than 150 fs, or in other words look like a concerted path. But a good number of trajectories reside in the betaine region for 1-2 ps.

In contrast, trajectories initiated from the betaine with equilibrated THF molecules indicate a median of 600 ps to travel from TS1 to TS2 and do not resemble a concerted path.

They argue that this bimodal distribution is in part associated with a solvent effect. When the first TS is crossed the solvent molecules are not equilibrated about the solute, and 10-20% of the trajectories immediately pass through the betaine region due to “dynamic matching” where the entering motion matches with exiting over the second transition state. The longer trajectories result from improper dynamic matching, but faster motion in the solute than motion amongst the solvent needed to stabilize the betaine. So, not only do we need to be concerned about dynamic effects involving the reactants, we need to be concerned about dynamics associated with the solvent too!

π-π-stacking has been a major theme of my blog, and is discussed in Chapter 3.5.4 in the Second Edition of my book. Most examples involved molecules that are nearly circular (like benzene or triphenylene). Hartley and co-workers discuss the π-π-stacking of the oblong molecule 1, comparing its experimental features with computed features of the model compound 2.1

The key spectroscopic feature associated with assembly of 1 are the changes in the 1H chemical shifts with increasing concentration. For example, the chemical shift of the three protons on the triphenylene unit shift upfield by 0.30 to 0.66 ppm as the concentration increases from 10-5 to 10-2 M.

To see if these NMR shift changes are due to association of 1, they employed a computational approach. First they optimized the structure of model compound 2 at B3LYP/6-31G(d) (Shown in Figure 1a). Then using this fixed geometry, they computed the 1H chemical shifts of the dimer of 2. They explored the stacking distance (ranging from 3.2 to 4.0 Å along with varying the displacement of the two molecules along the major axis from 0.0 to 6.0 Å, finding the best fit to the chemical shifts with a separation of 3.6 Å and a displacement along the major axis of 3.5 Å. Using these two fixed values, they explored displacement of the molecules along the minor axis, along with rotation of the two molecules. The best fit to the experimental chemical shifts was with a displacement of 0.5 Å along the short axis and no rotation. This structure is shown in Figure 1b, with a RMS error of only 0.09 ppm from experiment. Models of the trimer show poorer fit to the experimental data.

(a)

2

(b)

2
dimer

Figure 1. B3LYP/6-31G(d) (a) optimized structure of 2 and the (b) structure of the best fit of the dimer of 2. (As always, clicking on these images will allow you to manipulate the 3-D structure using JMol – highly recommended for the dimer.)

Using some smaller models and the B97-D functional, they argue that the displacement, which is substantially larger than the displacement found in stacked triphenylene, results from the need to minimize the steric interactions between the alkoxyl chains.

Comparing SN2 and SN1 reactions using computational methods is often quite difficult. The problem is that the heterolytic cleavage in the SN1 reaction leads to an ion pair, and in the gas phase this is a highly endothermic process. Optimization of the ion pair in the gas phase invariably leads to recombination. This is disturbingly the result even when one uses PCM to mimic the solvent, which one might have hoped would be sufficient to stabilize the ions.

The computational study of the glycoside cleavage by Hosoya and colleagues offers some guidance towards dealing with this problem.1 They examined the cleavage of triflate from 2,3,4,6-tetra-O-methyl-α-D-glucopyranosyl triflate 1.

Benchmarking the dissociation energy for the cleavage of 1 and considering computational performance, they settled on M06-2X/BS-III//M06-2X/BS-I, where BS-III is aug-cc-pVTZ basis set for O, F, and Cl and cc-pVTZ for H, C, and S and BS-I is 6-31G(d,p) basis sets were employed for H, C, and S, and 6-31+G(d) for O, F, and Cl. Solvent (dichloromethane) was included through PCM.

Attempted optimization of the contact ion pair formed from cleavage of 1 invariably led back to the covalent bound 1. PCM is not capable of properly stabilizing these types of ions in proximity. To solve this problem, they incorporated four explicit dichloromethane molecules. A minor drawback to their approach is that they did not sample much of configuration space and so their best geometries may not be the lowest energy configurations. Nonetheless, with four solvent molecules, they were able to locate contact ion pairs and solvent-separated ion pairs. Representative examples are shown in Figure 1. This method of explicit incorporation of a few solvent molecules seems to be the direction we must take to treat ions or even highly polar molecules in solution.